Archive for the ‘Get Fuzzy’ Category

Two days ago, a clean, friendly, litter box-trained kitten followed my wife home and stood at the back door until we let him in. He whimpered, whined, meowed, rolled around on the ground, and made it clear that he was both cold and hungry. It didn’t take long for us to buckle and open the door. That was a mistake. As soon as this new cat darted into the house, our old cat bounded after him, his dander having shot up to 11. Out cat hissed, growled, and did his best to intimidate the intruder. Within seconds, we ushered the confused kitten out to the garage, gave him some food, a blanket, and a makeshift litter box, and assured him we would look for his owners. We’d love to keep him, but apparently our cat won’t allow it.

Thinking back to last Christmas…someone did get me hammer. After months of using a vanity hammer from IKEA to help me gut my basement, my mother-in-law bought me a genuine, worksite-quality mallet. Now that I think about, I realize that I neglected to write a thank-you note. Allow me to make up for that: “Dear Mother-in-Law: Thank you for the construction-grade hammer. Not only did it help me tear out the last of the studs in the basement, it also helped me neutralize a band of Canadian guerrilla fighters in the battle of Chicago that you no doubt heard about on the news. The yellow handle was also quite striking. Yours truly, Dixon.”

Was the Grinch a hoarder? Hardly. If memory serves, he lived in a lightly decorated cave with a small dog. If anything, the Grinch couldn’t stand abundance and went to great lengths to confiscate Christmas presents. Once he loaded them on his sleigh, he hatched a plan to dump them in a valley, not take them back to his lair. Was Oscar the Grouch a hoarder? Maybe, but I have to assume that local garbagemen emptied his bin once a week. That is, unless Sesame Street was using its famous green grouch to criticize the infrequency of municipal garbage pickup in the late ‘60s.

If I ever want to confuse my cat, all I need to do is stay home from work. When I call in sick, he wanders around the house for hours. When I take a personal day, he curls up in my lap and sleeps. And when I go on vacation he meows for food…incessantly…at an earlier hour each day. Obviously, my cat is not ready to share the house with me during the week. He tolerates me on weekends, but mostly because I stay out of his way. It’s a big house, you’d think we could share it. You’d think that, but…no.

Comic strips are small. They may be drawn large, but they are shrunk to terrible depths so they can be squished onto newspaper pages. That’s a shame, because artists who take the time to add visual flair to their strips are often rewarded with a shrug. Take today’s Get Fuzzy, for example. The third panel, which shows a man staring at his cat, is silent, but the expression on the guy’s face is unmistakable: he’s deeply insulted, slightly surprised, and maybe even a little impressed by his cat calling him “peachy-not-so-keen.” It’s genuinely expressive, and well worth a squint.

One of the least endearing traits of Get Fuzzy is its habit of periodically portraying its animal characters as semi-literate. Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch are quite articulate on most days, so it seems forced when a punchline relies on one of them having a limited grasp of English. That said, the punny punchline in today’s strip more than makes up for the contrivance. After I got through chuckling, I was even inspired to learn more about the “Whore of Babylon” and stumbled upon this:

It’s an old school, pre-revolutionary Russian painting. Come to think of it, this painting also makes for a dynamite single-panel comic strip.

Speaking of rats, I found what appeared to be a dead one rotting in my backyard yesterday. Specifically, this creature was floating in a small, decorative bucket that had been filled with water and placed near the center of a flower bed. My wife called me over to ask what the mysterious thing was and at first I said it was a fish, due to its pale blue color. But upon further inspection, I saw a tail and realized that I was dealing with one very foul rodent. I know I should fashion a homemade pool skimmer and dispose of this rat as soon as possible (while also finding a way to drain the surely contaminated water from the bucket), but the whole situation is incredibly gross, so I think I may just put it off until tomorrow.